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October 22, 2010

A rather dreadful (and very large) image is making its way around the anime Twittersphere right now, and I figured rather than comment on it on Twitter (where I am more active than here, frankly) I would actually make a blog post about it. First and foremost, this image is unsourced. While the numbers on the right column are well-known, the numbers on the left need confirmation.

Edit: sure enough, it came in real fast via comments that these numbers were cherry-picked, listing only well-liked titles that sold poorly and leaving out nearly everything that's been successful for them. The image is one of those half-truth kinds of things people use to start fanboy debates on /a/. For real Madhouse numbers (in Japanese) have a look here and Ctrl+F "Death Note".

That said, the story it tells is probably not too far off the mark. In the left column we have first-volume DVD sales numbers for Madhouse titles. Their biggest seller is Black Lagoon at about 5,800 copies, and most of the titles don't make it past two thousand copies sold. We're talking about titles like Paranoia Agent, Kaiji, Kaiba (which sold under 500 copies). Every single show on that list is damn good.

In the right column-- and this is the really staggering part-- we have the biggest hit of every single other studio. Obviously this is much more mainstream fare: Gundam (Seed Destiny, what the fuck is wrong with you people), Macross (Frontier, what the fuck is...), FMA. Bakemonogatari, a very otaku piece of work, outsold everything.

The sales charts are about mainstream otaku fare, you see. Remember that video sales are the completely insane and suicidal system by which the anime industry makes all its money. It doesn't matter how many nerds on the Internet are buzzing at each other to watch a show: if people aren't lining up to buy your show for $80 a DVD or $100 a BD or whatever, you don't have a success. This industry depends entirely on the financial contributions of superfans.

To put the necessary level of superfandom in perspective, I did a little snooping on CD Japan. Current moe juggernaut K-On costs 8000y a Blu-Ray disc. The dollar is in really bad shape right now, so that's nearly a hundred dollars. There are 7 discs to buy of the first season and 9 to buy of the second. That's 128,000 yen. That's $1,571.73, leaving out the concert movie. That's just to own the show. According to that image, K-On has (thus far: it is by no means done) sold 52,761 DVDs and made Kyoani about five million bucks. In a niche this small, that's a hit.

I'm never going to pay $80 for two episodes of anime. The Shin Mazinger Blu-Rays are out there, and I'd love to own them, but I will never in my life be able to justify spending $600 on a TV show. Most folks are not going to pay $80 for two episodes of anything. This is a price point for the hardest of the hardcore, the money-to-burn rich, and absolutely nobody else. This price point is the core problem of the entire Japanese animation industry.

These Madhouse projects weren't going to make money, and I think Madhouse must understand this going in. There aren't ten thousand rich Fukumoto or Yuasa superfans out there to buy up $80 DVDs, and they're not going to appear.

Madhouse just wants to make good shows and do its own thing, and if these numbers are true, they're paying for it. It is worth noting that this chart leaves out the infrequent times Madhouse has tried to do something really otaku, like the horrendous Chaos;Head (which I bet sold), the "oh my god what the fuck am I even watching" Rizelmine, or even High School of the Dead. In any case, Madhouse might want to make a show about high school girls doing cute things (sans the gore), already. I won't watch it, but if they're lucky, the right person will.

October 04, 2010

And by New York Anime Fest I also mean New York Comic Con: the two events are running concurrently this year. I will be press with Colony Drop. As our sole East Coast representative, it's completely on me to cover the con. Which is why the guys want me to go to the speed dating session. Anyway!

NYAF/NYCC's on-site scheduler is horrendous, by the way. Rather than a visual schedule where you can plot out your trip, everything is individually listed. If you're looking to plan your day, you have to really fish through it. Horrible, guys. You've had a couple years to fix this, so come on and get it right. The fan cons put this to shame every single year. No excuses.

I'm mostly interested in showings: not a lot of interesting guests, nor panels, at NYAF this year. Con showings are kind of a crapshoot. As any of you who've ever been to an anime club probably know, it only takes one or two screaming, socially maladjusted fans to turn a perfectly good anime showing into an unfunny Mystery Science Theater 3000 bit. Now most people are fine-- I was genuinely surprised when the Otakon showing of Welcome to the Space Show was completely well-behaved-- but it only takes a couple bad eggs. From what I've seen, NYAF lets their bad eggs run freely around the Javits brandishing live steel, so I've worried about this a little bit.

(Given the latter statement, I am also a little worried that someone will get hurt with some live steel, and it'll take that for NYAF/NYCC to start caring about it.)

I had been somewhat excited to see the Gundam 00 movie, but I grilled a friend in Singapore who saw the film when it opened for the entire story, beginning to end. I was extremely cautious about this movie because of how bad the second season of the TV show was, and I was right to be concerned. This movie sounds much, much worse than season 2. It sounds like a complete disaster. I am dreading the premiere. If you don't trust me on this one, just look up a synopsis. Jesus Christ. I could write the Colony Drop review right now.

The premiere of Bones' new Star Driver (or Utena Robo) was supposed to be a big deal, but it just aired on TV in Japan and you know what that means. Everybody on the Internet's already seen it. All I have to say about it is that this show is going to be a big, fabulous deal. It's going to make the con crowd burst out in ear-shattering squeals, and the show is definitely going to be Geass-level popular. Hopefully it won't turn out to suck by the end!

I am not missing Mardock Scramble. It could go either way, but big-budget SF anime is something I will always line up for. (FULL DISCLOSURE: DAVE IS PRESS NOW, SO HE DOESN'T HAVE TO ACTUALLY LINE UP FOR STUFF LIKE THIS. IT IS A FIGURE OF SPEECH) The Haruhi movie, on the other hand... I've heard it's actually good, and mostly devoid of the things I hate about Haruhi, but frankly I'd rather start my post-con bar crawl early.

There are a lot of things I'm not looking forward to about NYAF/NYCC: the commute, the Javits' great distance from affordable anything, unprecedented overcrowding as every geek in NYC piles into one building, and the inability to relax and take a breath for even a moment as a result of same.

(I'm sure I posted this on this blog, but one time we finally found seats at the maid cafe (the only lounge in the place) and finally sat down to relax for a bit, only to have the giant speaker situated behind us blast us with the sounds of maids yelling "IT'S COSPLAY DAAAANCE TIIIIME!" Whenever people ask me what the atmosphere at NYAF is like, I just tell them that story.)

Anyway, I am looking forward to Mardock Scramble and, of course, the nice people from all over the Internet that I'll be seeing. And it's not like it costs me anything!

So I have a fancy phone these days. For all the Apple BS, occassionally baffling design decisions, and AT&T, it's a hell of a useful toy. As for games, it's a pretty weak platform. There are standouts, but the iTunes store is so flooded with shovelware that it's hard to find anything even if it were in fact out there. Once I got done with Dodonpachi (who am I kidding, you never get done with Dodonpachi), I started looking for mahjong apps. Of course, I had quite a task ahead of me here: type "mahjong" into the iTunes store and you get a absolute pile of tile-matching shovelware. The real thing, in any national variation, is nowhere to be found.

So here's the part where you cut and paste kanji into iTunes search. Here are the characters for "mahjong".

麻雀

Put that in and you'll get a bunch of real mahjong titles in a variety of Asian rulesets. Go crazy. Note that these games all have really low user ratings. Don't trust them: most users are looking for tile-matching games. And now, I will recommend some stuff and probably spare you the search.

(Don't assume any of these games to be in English. They ain't.)

For Japanese-style MJ, I have Professional Mahjong Kiwame. I bought it during a sale, so it only cost me a buck, but now it's $3. Either way it's probably the best single-player app you can get. Kiwame is a very long-running series by Athena (Dezaemon) and the phone version packs the basics in nicely. Selecting tiles on the touchscreen can sometimes be a problem in the vertical display, so the game uses the horizontal display. The game has a long single-player mode, free battle, extensive customization options, and stat tracking. There's a demo if you want to check it out before you buy. Like I said, it was a buck when I got it so I didn't even bother with the demo.

Athena also sells training and score calculator apps. Of these I've only got Mahjong Training Kiwame, which has "what are my waits" and scoring questions. Their calculator looks better than the cheat sheet app I was using, and I'll probably have to grab it. There are also two one-dollar teaching apps that are only going to do you good if you can really read the language (and I can't).

If you need online play, Net Jankyo is a full-featured, free-to-play online client (BY HUDSON). It deals with the touchscreen issue by giving you a slider, which is probably the single best control method I can think of. I just can't imagine comitting myself to a 40-minute match on the phone when my PC and Tenhou are right here. And it's obviously inconvenient for travel!

Edit 11/2/10: Konami will be porting their Mahjong Fight Club to the platform on an unspecified date in the fall. The last time I tried to log into Net Jankyo, I couldn't get in.

Edit 1/6/11: Mahjong Fight Club is on the Japanese App Store, but not anywhere else. If you must have it (at 800y) then you will probably have to buy a Japanese iTunes point card.

October 03, 2010

(This post is going to appear on the front page on the Sunday of every Astro Toy article from now on.)

Are you here from Astro Toy? My site statistics say that today, you probably are! When I get an influx of new readers I like to make a re-introduction.

My name's Dave, and I write about geek stuff on the internet. I've been at it for a long time, now: this blog is almost four years old. In case you didn't notice from the column, I have a thing for the obscure, the unusual, and of course robots. By all means, please dig around.

I freely admit that updates to this blog have been slow, but I also write for a couple of other places: Colony Drop is the group blog that some friends and I started a little while back. It's a refuge for the older, perhaps jaded, anime fan and we have a ton of fun doing it. I am the "Good Cop", but we are all mad, and we work hard to make anime fans everywhere as mad as we are.

Otaku USA (the magazine and the website) is written by People From the Internet, and I recently became one of those people. I'll be making my first appearance in the next issue, and I've already written a number of pieces for the website about such very serious topics as Dodonpachi and mahjong. If all goes well, my Recettear review should pop up there soon too! In the meantime, buy Recettear on Steam immediately. You can thank me later.